Despite mass privatization and market reforms in Russia, the central state continues to redistribute considerable amounts of money between the country's eighty-nine regions. About 4.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) – or 31 per cent of federal tax revenues – was transferred back to the budgets of the regions in 1994. The average region recovered about 45 per cent of the taxes it remitted to the centre in different kinds of budget transfers, up from 37 per cent in 1993. But this understates the true scale of redistribution. In addition, many federal spending programmes, while not explicitly targeted at particular regions, had a geographically concentrated impact. This includes ‘indirect’ transfers due to revisions of the proportion of tax the regions were permitted to keep from those proportions voted in the federal budget. Russia's 4.3 per cent compares to grants to state governments of 0.7 per cent of GDP in Austria (1992), 2.5 per cent in the United States (1992), 3.6 per cent in Germany (1992), and 3.9 per cent in Canada (1991) (calculated from OECD, Revenue Statistics of OECD Member Countries: 1965–1994 (Paris: OECD, 1995)).Aleksei Lavrov, ‘Rossiiskiy Byudzhetny Federalizm: Pervie Shagi, Pervie Itogi’, Segodnya, 104 (7 June 1995), p. 5.

Leaders and activists in most Western political parties, appreciating Schattschneider's adage1 that parties are controlled by those who control nominations to public offices, jealously guard their right to choose parliamentary candidates. They realize that candidates play a crucial role in shaping voters’ images of the parties as well as in formulating the party policies. Not surprisingly, candidates are usually recruited through rather oligarchical procedures. Extra-parliamentary party leaders normally pick the nominees in closed private meetings and then submit their choices to rank-and-file party members and/or delegates who nearly always grant their approval. Such procedures reduce the role of party members to one of docile acquiescence, and completely exclude party voters.

How does the risk of gridlock affect the type of legislative output? Do bureaucratic agents expand their activities when they can expect that the principals are unable to overrule them? This article introduces a novel approach for calculating the risk of gridlock in bicameral legislatures in order to estimate its impact on bureaucratic activities, combining data on all secondary and tertiary acts of the European Union (EU) from 1983 to 2009. The findings reveal that bureaucratic activities expand when the risk of gridlock increases and an overruling of tertiary acts becomes less likely. This may sustain the EU's overall decision-making productivity, but its bureaucratic nature may raise further questions about democratic legitimacy and principal-agent problems in the representation of interests.

In the Westminster system the prime minister's active participation in parliamentary proceedings is a key mechanism for ensuring the accountability of the executive. We survey the evolution of the four main prime ministerial activities across the period 1868–1990. There has been a long-term decline in prime ministers' speeches in the Commons, a stepped decline in debating interventions and a significant decrease in question-answering from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. But prime ministerial statement-making increased after 1940, ebbing away again in the 1980s. And the downward drift in question-answering was halted by procedural innovations since the 1960s, which standardized the frequency of prime ministers' appearances and lead to the dominance of ‘open’ questions. We trace the varied impacts of institutional changes and shorter-term political or personal influences. The direct accountability of the prime minister to Parliament has undoubtedly declined, a trend probably paralleled by decreasing indirect accountability. These findings raise fundamental questions about executive-legislature relations in the United Kingdom

Government formation in multiparty systems is of self-evident substantive importance, and the subject of an enormous theoretical literature. Empirical evaluations of models of government formation tend to separate government formation per se from the distribution of key government pay-offs, such as cabinet portfolios, between members of the resulting government. Models of government formation are necessarily specified ex ante, absent any knowledge of the government that forms. Models of the distribution of cabinet portfolios are typically, though not necessarily, specified ex post, taking into account knowledge of the identity of some government ‘formateur’ or even of the composition of the eventual cabinet. This disjunction lies at the heart of a notorious contradiction between predictions of the distribution of cabinet portfolios made by canonical models of legislative bargaining and the robust empirical regularity of proportional portfolio allocations – Gamson’s Law. This article resolves this contradiction by specifying and estimating a joint model of cabinet formation and portfolio distribution that, for example, predicts ex ante which parties will receive zero portfolios rather than taking this as given ex post. It concludes that canonical models of legislative bargaining do increase the ability to predict government membership, but that portfolio distribution between government members conforms robustly to a proportionality norm because portfolio distribution follows the much more difficult process of policy bargaining in the typical government formation process.

The study of global co-operation and conflict has been a central topic of enquiry in the field of international relations. Yet notwithstanding extensive work on these subjects, they are not well understood. Whenever research fails to resolve an intractable problem, it may be because the conceptualization of the dependent variable is fundamentally flawed and/or because the most critical independent variables have been ignored. The purpose of this analysis is to see if, by confronting these two problems, our ability to explain global contention can be improved.

When autocratic ruling parties accede to democratization, they do not always fade away into history. Following forty-one transitions since 1940, including those in Mexico, Taiwan, Bulgaria and Ghana, the ruling party survived and won power after democratization. Why do some former autocratic parties prosper under democracy while others quickly dissolve? What effect does this have on democratic survival? This article uses original data to predict the post-transition fates of eighty-four autocratic ruling parties through 2015. Whereas extant theories emphasize radical reinvention and outsider struggle, the author argues that success is instead about maintaining ruling-party advantages into the democratic period. Parties succeed when they have authoritarian legacies that easily translate to democratic competition, such as broad programmatic experience, strong organization and policy success. In addition, democratic institutions that disadvantage new parties and actors benefit autocratic parties. Lastly, an instrumental variables design shows that autocratic party success negatively impacts democratic survival and quality.

Research on political style suggests that where women make arguments that are more emotional, empathetic and positive, men use language that is more analytical, aggressive and complex. However, existing work does not consider how gendered patterns of style vary over time. Focusing on the UK, we argue that pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years. To test this argument, we describe novel quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data. Analysing UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019, we show that the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication. Our findings imply that prominent gender-based stereotypes of politicians' behaviour are significantly worse descriptors of empirical reality now than they were in the past.

Which parties benefit from open-list (as opposed to closed-list) proportional representation elections? This article shows that a move from closed-list to open-list competition is likely to be more favorable to parties with more internal disagreement on salient issues; this is because voters who might have voted for a unified party under closed lists may be drawn to specific candidates within internally divided parties under open lists. The study provides experimental evidence of this phenomenon in a hypothetical European Parliament election in the UK, in which using an open-list ballot would shift support from UKIP (the Eurosceptic party) to Eurosceptic candidates of the Conservative Party. The findings suggest that open-list ballots could restrict support for parties that primarily mobilize on a single issue.

Advocates of the welfare state often appeal to social justice as the moral basis of their claim that distribution of scarce resources ought to be made in proportion to the needs of potential recipients, at least to a certain minimum level of satisfaction. More generally, it is commonly assumed that need is certainly one and perhaps the main factor which ought to determine any just distribution of benefits and burdens. Thus, when the Labour Government abolished medical prescription charges under the National Health Service in 1964 the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, defended this step in the House of Commons by saying that it was ‘unjust’ to put such ‘burdens on the old and sick’ and he went on to cite the principle ‘from each according to his means, to each according to his needs’.

This article explores if (and how) national elections affect the chances of concluding an international agreement. Drawing on a literature about the informational efficiency of elections, it examines how political uncertainty in the run-up to an election impacts the dynamics of international negotiations. Using the case of decision making in the European Union (EU), it finds that (1) pending national elections significantly reduce the chances of reaching an agreement at the international level (2) this effect is strongest during close elections with uncertain outcomes and (3) the effect is particularly pronounced in the case of elections in larger member states. The findings highlight the fruitfulness of further research on the dynamics between national and international politics. The article has positive and normative implications for the literature on two-level games, international negotiations and legislative bargaining in the EU.

Samuels and Snyder in their recent article in this Journal presented an index of malapportionment (i.e., the discrepancy between seat shares and population shares by electoral districts) in national legislatures for seventy-eight countries. This short Research Note merges their index with the Gini index, a commonly used measure of income inequality, and explores cross-nationally the relationship between inequality in political representation and inequality in economic conditions.

This article tests the applicability of the democratic peace thesis tosub-Saharan African states by examining a ‘politicalinversion’ thesis. This suggests that the domestic politicalframework of African states compels their leaders to engage in internationalconflict, contrary to what the democratic peace thesiests: namely, politicallyopen African states are more likely to fight each other. This conclusion raisesthe issue of the universality of the democratic peace thesis; therefore, theextent to which the democratic peace is evident across other regions of theworld is examined. Empirical analyses of state dyads 1950–2001demonstrate that politically open African states are more likely to fight eachother and, moreover, the democratic peace does not hold in any region outside the West. These findings supportthe political inversion thesis of African conflicts and challenge the suggestionthat the spread of democracy will occasion international peace throughout theworld.

This is an evaluation of the impact of corporatist and pluralist employers' associations on firms' programmatic participation in active labour-market and social policies in Denmark and Britain. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with randomly-selected companies, it explores whether employers' associations engage differently with their constituent firms in corporatist and pluralist settings, and whether corporatist countries have an advantage in implementing active social policies. Variations in type of employer organization are found to constitute a determinant of cross-national differences in business attitudes towards the welfare state. Membership in a Danish employers' association confers an entirely different set of effects from membership in a British group and associational membership is a significant positive determinant of firm participation in Denmark but not in Britain. Active social policy has been viewed as a growth opportunity in a new issue area by the Danish ‘peak’ employers' association and its sectoral members. Although this association is losing some control over collective bargaining, its constituent associations have developed other functions, such as creating deliberative forums for managers, especially at the local level. The research also highlights the role of the state in the renegotiation and survival of corporatist institutional arrangements.

Policy-making reflects the combined activity of both politicians and higher civil servants; both have their hands on the tiller of the ship of state. But they approach problems of governing from different perspectives – partisan or bureaucratic – and each has a different contribution to make. This article considers six models of the relationship, varying according to inputs of political will and the probability of programmes achieving success. They are: willpower dominates; perfectly informed trade-offs; everything is uncertain; everything is predetermined; capture by civil servants; and policies dominate. The analysis emphasizes that there is a greater need for changes in the knowledge and behaviour of politicians in office than for further reform of the civil service.

Studies of political budget cycles in developing countries have generally sought to inform understanding of short-term fiscal dynamics, but can also offer unique insight into broader political dynamics in developing countries. This article correspondingly employs markedly improved data in order to study the impact of elections on tax collection, and draw broader lessons. It shows that while elections as a group have had no significant effect on tax collection, the subset of competitive elections has had a significant negative impact on pre-election tax collection; while this effect appears to be largest where incumbents are particularly unpopular. This provides powerful evidence that the impact of elections on political incentives in developing countries is conditioned by the existence of an electorally competitive opposition, while offering preliminary evidence that popular resistance to taxation by unpopular governments may be an important means by which taxpayers may generate pressure for improved governance.

The political and economic couplings between wage bargaining institutions and macro-economic policy regimes are explored in this article. It is argued that in advanced industrialized democracies with well-organized unions and employers' associations, macro-economic performance (especially unemployment) is the outcome of an interaction between the centralization of the wage bargaining system and the monetary policy regime. Thus, a decentralized bargaining system in which the government in credibly committed to a non-accommodating monetary policy rule poses an institutional alternative to a centralized mode of wage regulation where the government enjoys macro-economic policy flexibility. Based on time-series data from ten highly organized market economies, I show that both of these institutional ‘equilibria’ produce superior employment performance, but also that the two systems are associated with very different distributional outcomes, and that they are supported by different coalitions of organized interests. In addition to predicting economic outcomes, the proposed model provides a theoretical framework for analysing institutional change in wage bargaining systems and in macro-economic policy regimes.

This article examines how human rights international non-governmental organizations (hereafter HROs) can increase the level of political protest in neighboring states. Previous research suggests local activities of HROs help to generate mobilization for protests against governments. This article shows that the presence of HROs in neighboring states can be a substitute for domestic HROs; if domestic HROs are already flourishing, there will be less of a ‘neighbor’ effect. At sufficiently high levels of domestic HRO prevalence within a state, neighboring HROs help domestic HROs use institutionalized substitutes for protest mobilization strategies. Spatial econometric methods are used to test the implications of this theory. These results illuminate the role that non-governmental organizations play in these domestic political processes, and demonstrate the transnational nature of their activities.